While most of the music world was looking forward, Ray Davies of The Kinks looked back. And when he did look ahead, or at least outside at the world around him, he didn’t often like what he saw.
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The Kinks’ Muswell Hillbillies album, released in 1971, often indulged in antiquated sounds and subject matter. “20th Century Man”, the whip-smart opening track, featured a man out of time, struggling to cope with his life in the here and now.
Ray’s Remembrances
The Kinks made one of the most rapid transformations of all the British Invasion bands of the 60s. Their opening singles (“All Day And All Of The Night” and “You Really Got Me”) introduced them as fuzz-rocking rebels. But they didn’t stay in that lane very long.
Ray Davies, the band’s lead singer, developed as a songwriter in a mighty hurry. It wasn’t long after those first two hits that he moved on to penning subtle tales of frustration and angst, told from the perspective of regular folks seemingly far removed from the rock star lifestyle. Davies’ affinity for the common man and woman led him to write a series of touching concept albums about their everyday struggles and triumphs.
Muswell Hillbillies represents the apotheosis of these efforts. The title refers to the area where Ray Davies and his brother Dave, The Kinks’ lead guitarist, grew up. Ray’s affection for those times and that location can be heard throughout the record. So too can his discomfort with the modern world encroaching on those subtle joys.
On the album’s opening track, “20th Century Man”, he takes on the role of a regular guy who wants to go back to the simpler pleasures of life. But he’s beset on all sides by modernity and its aggravations. By song’s end, you start to wonder if this guy might do something drastic to try and bring his world to some sort of order.
Examining The Lyrics of “20th Century Man”
When the lead character of “20th Century Man” looks out at humankind’s technological advances, he only sees the downside.
“A mechanical nightmare,” he calls it.
“The wonderful world of technology,” he sneers sarcastically. “Napalm hydrogen bombs biological warfare.”
And he’s off and running with his likes (all quaint and antiquated) and dislikes (all brash and newfangled).
“What has become of the green pleasant fields of Jerusalem,” he wonders.
He reveals that the world, as it is now, has squelched all his prospects: “Ain’t got no ambition / I’m just disillusioned / I’m a twentieth century man but I don’t want, I don’t wan’t to be here.”
He blames it all on his circumstances rather than anything of his own doing. “I’m a paranoid schizoid product of the twentieth century,” he says.
To make his point, he runs down a list of literary and artistic heroes, including Shakespeare and Rembrandt, who predate him by many generations.
In the middle eight, his paranoia ratchets up to another level. He worries about “civil servants and people dressed in gray.” He believes his personal freedoms have been stolen. Eventually, he worries about a tragic fate, perhaps getting shot in the streets.
“I’m a twentieth-century man but I don’t want to die here.”
Many of Ray Davies’ other character sketches on Muswell Hillbillies take on more of a benign tone. But “20th Century Man” presents a guy barely holding it together in a menacing dystopia that just might be all in his mind.
Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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